


Heathens: The Hunters and The Angel

by FalCatrecon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Multi, murder descriptions, nonfiction writing style
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-01-12 06:20:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18440807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FalCatrecon/pseuds/FalCatrecon
Summary: For the @spnpolybingo square ‘Serial Killer AU’-----A ‘nonfiction’ article about the serial killers The Hunters and The Angel. A harrowing account of the life of the Winchesters and how they encountered a fellow killer calling himself Castiel.





	Heathens: The Hunters and The Angel

As with any sociopath, the Winchesters’ start is a poor one. Their father, John Winchester, drug them from school to school. He couldn’t keep a job and they floated between seedy motels. Each new place was just a way of running away from the last, filled with either imaginary threats or real ones because someone had found out how much he beat his eldest, Dean, and drank himself into a stupor the rest of the time. The youngest, Sam, followed in his brother’s footsteps, finding solace in his protection against his father and the world at large. He was, at first, assumed to have the classic signs of stockholm syndrome, but as he and his brother matured it was clear he was of his own mind. It is unknown if their closer relationship began this early or not.

When their father finally disappeared under mysterious circumstances the brothers were split apart into the foster care system. Dean was only months away from being of age and slipped his caretaker easily. Sam seemed to try and integrate into society, but after a brutal incident involving a fellow foster child he ran as well, finding his brother somewhere in the missing time. As soon as Dean was eighteen they showed up at a courthouse so he could try and properly adopt his brother. Of course with what became Sam’s first physical abuse charge, they were brought into custody. That too didn’t last long as the officers on scene treated them like the children they appeared to be, not the budding serial killers they would become.

John, who was initially deemed simply missing, was found years after his disappearance buried in the lawn near the motel in which he was last seen. It is unknown if they had victims prior to him, but the obvious hallmarks that would become their M.O. was already apparent in the mutilation of their father’s body. He was shot with the gun that was registered to him, a colt, and a very botched beheading was performed post-mortem.

The way they killed came from the stories their father told during his drunken episodes. According to records and later testimonies, they lost their mother, Mary, to a house fire caused by a lit cigarette of John’s. He quit smoking immediately after they lost their house, but the damage was done. In his worst drunken stupors he claimed it was creatures, different each time, and would tell the children how to kill them. When he was lucid he would admit it was his fault, but then immediately begin drinking again.

Not too long after escaping custody, they broke their father’s car out of the impound lot it had been stored at and began their drive across the nation. Early on they aimed for the easy kills, hitchhikers and other high risk targets. The gun they took from their father featured heavily in their first kills, finishing off the people in various ways from beheadings to full organ removal. It was always a brutal mess in the end. As they got older they learned to burn at least some of their kills, eliminating evidence. 

The most remarkable part of their story however isn’t their early kills. We as a society have unfortunately seen many familial killers, ie: the Cook Brothers, but much rarer are two dominant personalities sharing space and subordinate. Here enters Angel. His M.O. is much more elaborate and precise than the brothers’ brutal approach. Before encountering them, he specialized in organ removal, specifically eyes and tongues. As his own method evolved, he had begun cauterizing the wounds and then removing the vocal cords, likely so the victim could not make noise. He kept them near for days at a time as they slowly starved before finally suffocating them.

His start is unknown as he somewhere decided he did not need identifying marks. He took the time to burn his fingerprints and, likely through some back-alley dentist, had his teeth modified. As he as all the earmarks of a psychopath, there is no telling if his previous upbringing was socially acceptable or not. From what we can gather from testimonies and scraps of papers found at scenes, he at least came from a large household with a likely absentee father. While the news outlets decided on Angel of Death, he contacted the papers and named himself Castiel. It seems to be a variant of Cassiel, who presided over humanity and death. Castiel in the more literal sense is ‘cast from god’.

His earliest victims were more brutal, the eyes and tongue physically torn out of the skull rather than surgically removed. This points to the careful precision as learned behavior rather than self-taught, and as his ease with integrating with the Winchesters also points to a possible prior relationship. This may be where the brothers fit in, depending on how far the psychopathic tendencies ran in his family.

What had them meet was a shared victimology. Both prefered a varied pool visually, but they each believed they were saving people with each kill. They had both found themselves trailing a psychic, Castiel having apparently encountered her first. Dean was supposed to get to her and bring her back to Sam, but he instead found himself in Castiel’s clutches. But what made this encounter remarkable was that neither killed the other. They worked together instead, and the result was missing eyes and a deep, tearing gut wound. At some point Sam had arrived to rescue Dean, but was stopped from killing what was now a fellow partner in the relationship.

This development made the Winchesters’ killings more sophisticated and caused Castiel’s to devolve. Instead of the precision prior, his M.O. degraded back to the violent tearing out of the prefered organs and much more brutal removal of the vocal cords. He was also a lot less likely to keep his victims around nearly as long, letting Dean and Sam finish them how they deemed fit instead of his arguably more peaceful suffocation. He too joined them in the more caravan lifestyle, going from town to town rather than setting up shop for awhile in a larger city.

The problem was that Castiel and Dean were becoming more and more fascinated with each other and left Sam to himself more and more often. Surrounding the new duo’s kills were a smattering of even more brutally destroyed bodies. These had the hallmarks of Castiel’s missing eyes, but they were carved out past the bone post-mortem. What killed these victims were more often than not a beating followed by multiple stab and slash wounds. There was even a singular case of an entire small town diner killed in this manner. The mimicry of the eyes shows an attempt at getting his brother’s attention, but the escalation of the brutality is evidence of frustration and anger. He was getting replaced.

While the police were frantic at the scaled up pace, it seemed the two were oblivious, or blatantly ignoring Sam’s cries for attention. It came to a head one late summer night when Sam walked himself into a local police station offering himself up for arrest. He stayed calm through the whole process, though refused to talk about anything in particular other than who he was until he was faced with the FBI agents who had been assigned to the trio. There he carefully laid out his and his brother’s past and what they had been doing up until now. He claimed the victims were demons and other such monsters, but that he had clear moments while his brother never did. He blamed it mostly on their father, though still claimed the father was missing rather than dead. When questioned on the whereabouts of the other two he said simply that they were together now and refused to elaborate any further.

He staunchly refused to directly comment about Castiel, and what little we know of the Angel is from side comments when talking about the time all three were together. Years later, with his execution date creeping closer, Sam finally told where their final resting place was, a shared gravesite deep in a forest local to the area he had turned himself in at. He finally admitted at being angry at their relationship and had lashed out. He claims to have long since come to terms and hopes they are happy together now.


End file.
